I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  One tent in particular drew my attention. There, young men gave refugees bags with food and clothes, then sought to engage them in conversation about the true Islamic path.

  Most of the men who worked in the tent wore the gandoura, a long dress common among North African men. Some had beards.

  Were these the “brothers” that the Tunisian from London had mentioned? After greeting them politely, I asked if they belonged to any specific group or organization. “We are just here to help the refugees,” one answered. He was cooking bean and vegetable soup on a large propane camp stove.

  I asked what he did when he wasn’t here.

  “I just got out of prison. Since then I am helping here.” He told me he’d been jailed for teaching the “true words of Islam.”

  Two other men were standing nearby, peeling carrots and potatoes for the soup. “Were you all also in prison?” I asked. They nodded. In the wake of the so-called Jasmine Revolution, hundreds of prisoners had been released in a general amnesty, including many jihadists. I asked about the name of their organization. Who was paying for all the vegetables in their soup and everything else they were giving to the refugees? They looked at each other. They had an emir, they told me, but weren’t allowed to say anything more unless he ordered them to do so.

  This surprised Ahmad. Like thousands of other young Tunisians, he’d taken to the streets and called for Ben Ali to leave. “Why do you need permission?” he asked. “We had a revolution. This is a free country now. You can speak freely. That’s what we all risked our lives for.”

  But men like these evidently wanted something far different from what Ahmad and his friends had fought for. “I cannot speak without the approval of the emir,” insisted one of the men, who said his name was Salah.

  I thanked him and said I would be back. A group of refugees was waiting patiently for the soup to be ready. I left with Ahmad, who was still disturbed by what we’d just witnessed. Ahmad was Muslim, but very liberal and a committed feminist; he didn’t like to see people mixing religion and politics, or trying to radicalize vulnerable refugees. He had different ambitions for his country.

  As we walked to the car, I dug out my phone from my bag and dialed a UK cell number. The wife of the Tunisian I’d met in London picked up and handed him the phone.

  “I am in Ra’s Ajdir, and I think I found your brothers,” I said. “One of them is named Salah, but he says he can’t speak without the permission of his emir. Can you help?”

  I heard laughter on the other end of the line. “Insha’Allah, God willing, all will be good,” he answered. “I will try to reach his emir.”

  I thanked him and hung up.

  “Who did you speak to?” Ahmad asked.

  “That was the key to the emir,” I replied.

  Next, Ahmad and I went to a nearby Moroccan field hospital where we’d become friendly with some doctors. They would serve us fresh mint tea and share stories. Most of their patients suffered from diarrhea or skin rashes from sleeping in tents without much access to water and soap. From time to time, they also treated men with bullet wounds and women who had been raped in the camp. They said those cases were the hardest.

  While we were talking to them, my phone rang. “You can go back to the tent,” a woman on the other end of the line told me in Arabic. “Salah got instructions.” Then the phone went dead.

  Salah was inside with the two men we’d seen earlier and another man we hadn’t met. I asked if he had any news from his emir.

  “Yes, Sister Souad, he can speak to you,” the new man answered. “The emir gave him permission.”

  I asked who he was, but he wouldn’t give me his real name, instead calling himself Abu Khaled.

  “Can I talk to the emir?” I asked.

  “No, you can’t, but he sends his regards.”

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I haven’t received the permission to speak, only Salah has.”

  “You seem to have tough rules in your group,” I said. “Is the emir in Tunisia?”

  He smiled. “My sister, you can try whatever way you like to get information out of me, but you won’t succeed in what over fifteen years of prison and torture weren’t able to do.”

  “Why were you in prison?”

  “For preaching the right way of our religion.”

  He answered like so many others I had spoken to before and after him. What they often meant was that they had not only preached Islam, but also called for the toppling of regimes in the region, and in some cases for establishing a structure and rules based on Sharia as they interpreted it.

  A few weeks earlier, Cuspert had told me about men like this. I wondered if there was a connection.

  “Do you know Abu Maleeq from Germany? The one who sings hip-hop?”

  “You mean the rapper?” Abu Khaled responded. Then his face suddenly changed, as if he knew he had said too much.

  I tried to make him feel better, telling him he had nothing to worry about. I had already known that Abu Maleeq was in touch with them, that there was some kind of link, so technically he hadn’t violated the order not to say anything.

  I arranged to meet Salah that evening in a hotel in a nearby town to talk about his life and upbringing. I learned that he had come from a rural part of Tunisia. Born into a lower-middle-class family, he knew that even though he did well in school, he would have no chance to go to university. “I have eight brothers and sisters, and I am the oldest, so I had to start working to help my parents,” he told me. He began selling drugs in a larger neighboring city and dreamed of going to Europe.

  Then one day in 1999, when Salah was nineteen, he ran into another young man who had grown up in the same neighborhood. This man told Salah about a preacher who had fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and who had deeply influenced him. “I went with him and met this sheikh, who is today our emir,” Salah said. “He told me that this life wasn’t important, but the afterlife was, and that whatever I was doing today would count in the afterlife.”

  He stopped selling drugs and began to study with the sheikh. The man gave Salah and his other students a monthly salary so they could help their families.

  The more time he spent with the group, the more he saw how “wrong” Tunisian and Western policies were. “No one cares about Muslim lives,” he said, but he apparently believed his sheikh did. Salah’s mentor planned to send him and others to Iraq in 2004 to fight alongside Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but Tunisian authorities arrested them and charged them with being members of a terrorist organization. Salah and his friends were sentenced to fifteen to twenty years in prison.

  “All for helping our sisters and brothers in Iraq,” Salah said. The Tunisian security forces and prison guards tortured him and his comrades, even raping some of them, but he believed they had grown stronger in prison. I’d seen this before in other places. Militants were sent to prison and tortured, further radicalizing them. While there, they often met and connected with like-minded people who reinforced their views.

  “And what now?”

  “Now, Allah has freed us from the dog Ben Ali and the dogs of America in Tunisia. Next is Libya, then Algeria, then Morocco and all of the Islamic world.”

  He told me that some of his “brothers” had already traveled to Libya and were fighting there alongside Libyans against the Gaddafi regime. “We also send brothers to Syria,” he said.

  “And when the rulers are gone,” I asked, “what is your aim?”

  “The caliphate,” he answered. I remembered my conversations with Shaker al-Abssi in Lebanon, who had given me the same answer several years before.

  I flew back to Germany in mid-August. I called the imam in Berlin again and asked if he had heard anything from Cuspert.

  “Yes, he is still here in Berlin,” the imam answered. “He had to change his phone after the story broke about Arid Uka, but he asked me to give you his number.”

  I c
alled right away. “I must see you,” I told him.

  He began to laugh. “Yes, I heard you met some of my brothers in North Africa.”

  11

  Threats

  Bahrain, Iran, and Germany, 2011–13

  As protests erupted across the Middle East in the spring of 2011, one small country in particular drew my attention: Bahrain, an island emirate in the Arabian Gulf, off the coast of Saudi Arabia. The more time I spent there, the more convinced I became that Bahrain contained another clue to the true nature of the so-called Arab Spring. Much as Islamist groups were gaining ground under the banner of democracy in places such as Egypt and Libya, Bahrain was a shining example of the way religious and sectarian groups were hijacking old enmities for their own opportunistic ends. Only the players and the goals were slightly different in Bahrain. And Iran had a dog in the fight.

  A former British protectorate, Bahrain gained independence in 1971 and quickly established itself as an important business and security partner to the United States and home to its Fifth Fleet. Prosperous and developed, it is also comparatively progressive for the Gulf region: in 2002, it became a constitutional monarchy, expanded suffrage to women, and allowed them to run for office. Two years later, the country named its first female minister, and in 2008 it appointed a Jewish woman, Houda Nonoo, as its ambassador to the United States. She is believed to be the first Jewish ambassador in the Arab world.

  The main thing that sets Bahrain apart from its Arab Spring neighbors is its religious composition. Though there are no official or independent statistics, Bahrain is a Shia majority state that has long been ruled by a Sunni royal family, giving rise to decades of sporadic protests over sectarian discrimination. Iran also has a long-standing territorial interest in Bahrain. It officially renounced its claim to sovereignty over the island in 1970, when a UN report showed that the Bahrainis wanted independence, but that wasn’t the end of the story.

  Some Shia opposition figures who for decades had called for the overthrow of the royal family emerged as key leaders. While Western observers, diplomats, and journalists tended to see in Bahrain a nascent prodemocracy movement, some influential Shia religious leaders were also keen to convert a relatively progressive state into an Iranian-style Islamic republic. I saw how depressed some Shia women were in the more conservative parts of the country, wrapped in chadors with no right to divorce, even when their husbands abused them. The sectarian unrest and the push to make religion a bigger part of political and everyday life reminded me of what I’d seen in Iraq. The consequences, I knew, could be terrifying.

  At some stage, the democracy protests were hijacked by people who had old arguments with the Bahraini state. This isn’t to say there weren’t Bahrainis who wanted more rights—there were. The government’s crackdowns on protesters also entailed well-documented acts of torture, which were indefensible. But even if many Bahraini Shia felt discriminated against, it didn’t follow that they wanted to live in a religious state run by Shia clerics.

  The Shia opposition, while raising some legitimate concerns, could also be mercurial. In February, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa met with representatives of Al Wefaq, the largest Shia political party, including its secretary-general, the cleric Sheikh Ali Salman. According to Salman’s account, this meeting was held on the understanding that the crown prince was prepared to consider the significant demands for reform being expressed in the demonstrations. “During these discussions, which reportedly lasted for three hours, Al Wefaq voiced its reservations about the existing Constitution; expressed discontent with aspects of the government’s performance, composition, and powers; and asked that demonstrators at a major traffic circle be allowed to remain there,” it was later reported. “According to Al Wefaq’s account of the meeting, despite having previously agreed to consider the significant reform demands, the Crown Prince stated that he was not mandated to reach an agreement on these issues. The Crown Prince suggested that the demonstrators move to a more secure location because the [Bahraini government] was concerned for their safety from possible attacks by vigilantes.”

  After six Bahraini protesters were killed in a three-day period, another meeting was arranged, but Ali Salman didn’t show up. The crown prince waited all night. After this, the government concluded that the opposition didn’t want a legitimate agreement, further damaging any trust between the parties. The chances for a fruitful dialogue vanished.

  I traveled to Bahrain briefly in February 2011. I’d never been there, and I didn’t know what to expect. I spent time at the funerals of protesters who had been killed in the demonstrations, including a teenage boy who had died of a head wound. The doctors told his family he’d been hit by a tear gas canister. The family thought it was intentional. The women screaming and beating themselves at his funeral reminded me of the mourning for Aquila al-Hashimi in Iraq. But what the women in Bahrain shouted was different from what the crowd in 2003 had said. The Bahraini women called for “death to the soldiers of Yazid and Muawiya,” a reference to the Battle of Karbala in AD 680, when the soldiers of Yazid I, the Umayyad caliph, killed Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the son of Ali, along with many relatives, including Hussein’s infant son. The killings made Hussein a martyr and cemented the division between Sunni and Shia Muslims. The Shia consider themselves the loyal followers of Ali and commemorate the Battle of Karbala during the sacred month of Muharram with marches, tears, and self-flagellation.

  I asked the grieving women who they were talking about. The police and security forces, they told me.

  Like Bahrain’s government, the country’s security forces were mostly Sunni, while the protesters were mostly Shia. But some Shia police told me they were constantly under attack from their own communities, and they showed me videos of burning cars to prove the point. Many Bahraini police were of Indian or Pakistani descent, exposing another rift between the native Bahrainis and these migrants (and their descendants), who were mainly Sunni but often lacked the benefits of citizenship and faced discrimination as “outsiders.”

  Later that year, I ran into my former Washington Post colleague Anthony Shadid at a conference in Qatar. Anthony had been a persistent and definitive voice on the Arab Spring, and he had been violently kidnapped in Libya while covering the revolt against Gaddafi. He shared my interest in Bahrain, and he urged me to go back.

  But things were changing at the Times. In June, Bill Keller announced that he would step down as executive editor. Bill had always been a great supporter of the kind of investigative journalism I was doing, and of me personally. Along with my direct editors, he’d done much to help me in my years there.

  The new leadership at the paper had different plans. In one conversation later that year, a high-level editor told me that because Osama bin Laden had been killed, terrorism was no longer a major threat. The Arab Spring was a game changer, he continued. He seemed to believe that the Islamists had been soundly defeated by the energy of youthful democracy activists. I tried to explain that my conversations with Cuspert and my time at the Tunisian-Libyan border had suggested that a new generation of jihadists was emerging. But this editor was sure the Middle East was changing and that there wouldn’t be any space left for jihadists in this new world.

  I was shocked by his assessment and worried that if we didn’t cover these developments we’d be negligent, as we had been in the past. I remembered Maureen Fanning, the September 11 widow who had asked so movingly why no one had told her that so many people out there hated Americans. We couldn’t afford to let readers like her down again.

  At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder what these changes would mean for me as a freelance reporter working on contract. Was this the end of my career at the New York Times? My fears were soon borne out, as I found myself writing less for the flagship paper and more for the international edition, including a section called “The Female Factor.”

  There were many stories to tell about women in Bahrain. Of all the c
ountries in the Gulf region, its society was the most open-minded. Women had more rights; they could drive and hold leadership positions. Women also played an important role in the protests there. I interviewed Rula al-Saffar, a forty-nine-year-old nurse who had been detained for five months. She described being blindfolded, threatened, and tortured with electric shocks. Her description took me back to my experience in the Egyptian prison. I remembered the screaming I’d heard when I was blindfolded. The truth was, I felt a deep sympathy for her. But when I asked her and others about the rules for medical personnel protesting during work time and challenged some of what they said, a woman serving as a minder from Wa’ad, one of the leading opposition groups, asked me, “Are you working for the other side or what?”

  I soon learned that the minder’s reaction wasn’t unusual. The opposition, for all its merits, sought to impose a kind of thought orthodoxy on reporters writing about the uprising. The narrative was that the protests had been entirely peaceful and that no demonstrators had attacked police or anyone else. Yet I met Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi workers who said they’d been attacked by protesters. Other people of Asian descent recounted that they had been refused treatment at hospitals. But when I raised this matter with opposition leaders, they seemed offended. Such stories were not part of their carefully crafted narrative.

  Later, I spoke with Farida Ghulam, an education official whose husband, Ibrahim Sharif al-Sayed, was the general secretary of Wa’ad, whose formal name was the National Democratic Action Society. In 2011, al-Sayed was sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly planning to overthrow the government. Yet Ghulam mentioned that her son was studying at a university in Michigan on a scholarship from the crown prince’s office.

  “Does it mean your child’s education is paid for by the royal family?” I asked.

  She confirmed this. “But it’s their right,” she said of her son and his fellow scholarship students. “They worked hard for it.”